Frankfurt School: Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society. Herbert Marcuse.

1967

Herbert Marcuse. 1967

Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society

Written: in German in 1967;

First Published: by Beacon Press, Boston as Negations:
Essays in Critical Theory by Herbert Marcuse;
Source: Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate.
Mark-up: Andy Blunden.

I propose to consider here the strains and stresses in the so-called “affluent society,” a
phrase which has (rightly or wrongly) been coined to describe contemporary
American society. Its main characteristics are: (1) an abundant industrial and
technical capacity which is to a great extent spent in the production and distribution
of luxury goods, gadgets, waste, planned obsolescence, military or semimilitary
equipment – in short, in what economists and sociologists used to call “unproductive”
goods and services; (2) a rising standard of living, which also extends to previously
underprivileged parts of the population; (3) a high degree of concentration of
economic and political power, combined with a high degree of organization and
government intervention in the economy; (4) scientific and pseudoscientific
investigation, control, and manipulation of private and group behavior, both at work
and at leisure (including the behavior of the psyche, the soul, the unconscious, and the
subconscious) for commercial and political purposes. All these tendencies are
interrelated: they make up the syndrome which expresses the normal functioning of
the “affluent society.” To demonstrate this interrelation is not my task here; I take its
existence as the sociological basis for the thesis which I want to submit, namely, that
the strains and stresses suffered by the individual in the affluent society are grounded
in the normal functioning of this society (and of the individual!) rather than in its
disturbances and diseases.

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Frankfurt School: Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society. Herbert Marcuse. 1967

“Normal functioning:” I think the definition presents no difficulties for the doctor.
The organism functions normally if it functions, without disturbance, in accord with
the biological and physiological make-up of the human body. The human faculties
and capabilities are certainly very different among the members of the species, and
the species itself has changed greatly in the course of its history, but these changes
have occurred on a biological and physiological basis which has remained largely
constant. To be sure, the physician, in making his diagnosis and in proposing
treatment, will take into account the patient’s environment, upbringing, and
occupation; these factors may limit the extent to which normal functioning can be
defined and achieved, or they may even make this achievement impossible, but as
criterion and goal, normality remains a clear and meaningful concept. As such, it is
identical with “health,” and the various deviations from it are to various degrees of
“disease.”

The situation of the psychiatrist seems to be quite different. At first glance, normality
seems to be defined along the same lines the physician uses. The normal functioning
of the mind (psyche, psyche-soma) is that which enables the individual to perform, to
function in accord with his position as child, adolescent, parent, as a single person or
married, in accord with his job, profession, status. But this definition contains factors
of an entirely new dimension, namely, that of society, and society is a factor of
normality in a fare more essential sense than that of external influence, so much so
that “normal” seems to be a social and institutional rather than individual condition. It
is probably easy to agree on what is the normal functioning of the digestive tract, the
lungs, and the heart, but what is the normal functioning of the mind in love-making,
in other interpersonal relations, at work and at leisure, at a meeting of a board of
directors, on the golf course, in the slums, in prison, in the army? While the normal
functioning of the digestive tract or the lung is likely to be the same in the case of a
healthy corporation executive and of a healthy laborer, this does not hold true of their
minds. In fact, the one would be very abnormal if he regularly thought, felt, and
operated like the other. And what is “normal” lovemaking, a “normal” family, a
“normal” occupation?

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Frankfurt School: Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society. Herbert Marcuse. 1967

The psychiatrist might proceed like the general physician and direct therapy to
making the patient function within his family, in his job or environment, while trying
to influence and even change the environmental factors as much as this is in his
power. The limits will soon make themselves felt, for example, if the mental strains
and stresses of the patient are caused, not merely by certain bad conditions in his job,
in his neighborhood, in his social status, but by the very nature of the job, the
neighborhood, the status itself – in their normal condition. Then making him normal
for this condition would mean normalizing the strains and stresses, or to put it more
brutally: making him capable of being sick, of living his sickness as health, without
his noticing that he is sick precisely when he sees himself and is seen as healthy and
normal. This would be the case if his work is, by its very nature, “deadening,”
stupefying, wasteful (even though the job pays well and is “socially” necessary), or if
the person belongs to a minority group which is underprivileged in the established
society, traditionally poor and occupied mainly in menial and “dirty” physical labor.
But this would also be the case (in very different forms) on the other side of the fence
among the tycoons of business and politics, where efficient and profitable
performance requires (and reproduces) the qualities of smart ruthlessness, moral
indifference, and persistent aggressiveness. In such cases, “normal” functioning
would be tantamount to a distortion and mutilation of a human being – no matter how
modestly one may define the human qualities of a human being. Erich Fromm wrote
The Sane Society; it deals, not with the established, but with a future, society, the
implication being that the established society is not sane but insane. Is not the
individual who functions normally, adequately, and healthily as a citizen of a sick
society – is not such an individual himself sick? And would not a sick society require
an antagonistic concept of mental health, a meta-concept designating (and preserving)
mental qualities which are tabooed, arrested, or distorted by the “sanity” prevalent in
the sick society? (For example, mental health equals the ability to live as a dissenter,
to live a nonadjusted life.)

As a tentative definition of “sick society” we can say that a society is sick when its
basic institutions and relations, its structure, are such that they do not permit the use
of the available material and intellectual resources for the optimal development and

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Frankfurt School: Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society. Herbert Marcuse. 1967

satisfaction of individual needs. The larger the discrepancy between the potential and
actual human conditions, the greater the social need for what I term “surplus-
repression,” that is, repression necessitated not by the growth and preservation of
civilization but by the vested interest in maintaining an established society. Such
surplus-repression introduces (over and above, or rather underneath, the social
conflicts) new strains and stresses in the individuals. Usually handled by the normal
working of the social process, which assures adjustment and submission (fear of loss
of job or status, ostracism, and so forth, no special enforcement policies with respect
to the mind are required. But in the contemporary affluent society, the discrepancy
between the established modes of existence and the real possibilities of human
freedom is so great that, in order to prevent an explosion, society has to insure a more
effective mental coordination of individuals: in its unconscious as well as conscious
dimensions, the psyche is opened up and subjected to systematic manipulation and
control.

When I speak of the surplus-repression “required” for the maintenance of a society,

or of the need for systematic manipulation and control, I do not refer to individually
experienced social needs and consciously inaugurated policies: they may be thus
experienced and inaugurated or they may not. I rather speak of tendencies, forces
which can be identified by an analysis of the existing society and which assert
themselves even if the policy makers are not aware of them. They express the
requirements of the established apparatus of production, distribution, and
consumption – economic, technical, political, mental requirements which have to be
fulfilled in order to assure the continued functioning of the apparatus on which the
population depends, and the continuing function of the social relationships derived
from the organization of the apparatus. These objective tendencies become manifest
in the trend of the economy, in technological change, in the domestic and foreign
policy of a nation or group of nations, and they generate common, supraindividual
needs and goals in the different social classes, pressure groups, and parties. Under the
normal conditions of social cohesion, the objective tendencies override or absorb
individual interest and goals without exploding the society; however, the particular
interest is not simply determined by the universal: the former has its own range of

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Frankfurt School: Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society. Herbert Marcuse. 1967

freedom, and contributes, in accordance with its social position, to the shaping of the
general interest – but short of a revolution, the particular needs and goals will remain
defined by the predominant objective tendencies. Marx believed that they assert
themselves “behind the back” of the individuals; in the advanced societies of today,
this is true only with strong qualifications. Social engineering, scientific management
of enterprise and human relations, and manipulation of instinctual needs are practiced
on the policy-making level and testify to the degree of awareness within the general
blindness.

As for the systematic manipulation and control of the psyche in the advanced
industrial society, manipulation and control for what, and by whom? Over and above
all particular manipulation in the interest of certain businesses, policies, lobbies – the
general objective purpose is to reconcile the individual with the mode of existence
which his society imposes on him. Because of the high degree of surplus-repression
involved in such reconciliation, it is necessary to achieve a libidinal cathexis of the
merchandise the individual has to buy (or sell), the services he has to use (or
perform), the fun he has to enjoy, the status symbols he has to carry – necessary,
because the existence of the society depends on their uninterrupted production and
consumption. In other words, social needs must become individual needs, instinctual
needs. And to the degree to which the productivity of this society requires mass
production and mass consumption, these needs must be standardized, coordinated,
generalized. Certainly, these controls are not a conspiracy, they are not centralized in
any agency or group of agencies (although the trend toward centralization is gaining
momentum); they are rather diffused throughout the society, exercised by the
neighbors, the community, the peer groups, mass media, corporations, and (perhaps
least) by the government. But they are exercised with the help of, in fact rendered
possible by, science, by the social and behavioral sciences, and especially by
sociology and psychology. As industrial sociology and psychology, or, more
euphemistically, as “science of human relations,” these scientific efforts have become
an indispensable tool in the hands of the powers that be.

These brief remarks are suggestive of the depth of society’s ingression into the
psyche, the extent to which mental health, normality, is not that of the individual but

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Frankfurt School: Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society. Herbert Marcuse. 1967

of his society. Such a harmony between the individual and society would be highly
desirable if the society offered the individual the conditions for his development as a
human being in accord with the available possibilities of freedom, peace, and
happiness (that is in accord with the possible liberation of his life instincts), but it is
highly destructive to the individual if these conditions do not prevail. Where they do
not prevail, the healthy and normal individual is a human being equipped with all the
qualities which enable him to get along with others in his society, and these very
same qualities are the marks of repression, the marks of a mutilated human being,
who collaborates in his own repression, in the containment of potential individual and
social freedom, in the release of aggression. And this situation cannot be solved
within the framework of any psychology – a solution can be envisaged only on the
political level: in the struggle against society. To be sure, therapy could demonstrate
this situation and prepare the mental ground for such a struggle – but then psychiatry
would be a subversive undertaking.

The question now is whether the strains in contemporary American society, in the
affluent society, suggest the prevalence of conditions essentially negative to
individual development in the sense just discussed. Or, to formulate the question in
terms more indicate of the approach I propose to take: Do these strains vitiate the
very possibility of “healthy” individual development – healthy defined in terms of
optimal development of one’s intellectual and emotional faculties? The question calls
for an affirmative answer, that is, this society vitiates individual developments, if the
prevailing strains are related to the very structure of this society and if they activate in
its members instinctual needs and satisfactions which set the individuals against
themselves so that they reproduce and intensify their own repression.

At first glance, the strains in our society seem to be those characteristic of any society
which develops under the impact of great technological changes: they initiate new
modes of work and of leisure and thereby affect all social relationships, and bring
about a thorough transvaluation of values. Since physical labor tends to become
increasingly unnecessary and even wasteful, since the work of salaried employees too
becomes increasingly “automatic” and that of the politicians and administrators

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increasingly questionable, the traditional content of the struggle for existence appears
more meaningless and without substance the more it appears as unnecessary
necessity. But the future alternative, namely, the possible abolition of (alienated)
labor seems equally meaningless, nay, frightening. And indeed, if one envisages this
alternative as the progress and development of the established system, then the
dislocation of the content of life to free time suggest the shape of a nightmare:
massive self-realization, fun, sport in a steadily shrinking space.

But the threat of the “bogey of automation” is itself ideology. On the one hand it
serves the perpetuation and reproduction of technically obsolete and unnecessary jobs
and occupations (unemployment as normal condition, even if comfortable, seems
worse than stupefying routine work); on the other hand it justifies and promotes the
education and training of the managers and organization men of leisure time, that is to
say, it serves to prolong and enlarge control and manipulation.

The real danger for the established system is not the abolition of labor but the
possibility of nonalienated labor as the basis of the reproduction of society. Not that
people are no longer compelled to work, but that they might be compelled to work for
a very different life and in very different relations, that they might be given very
different goals and values, that they might have to live with a very different morality
– this is the “definite negation” of the established system, the liberating alternative.
For example, socially necessary labor might be organized for such efforts as the
rebuilding of cities and towns, the relocation of the places of work (so that people
learn again how to walk), the construction of industries which produce goods without
built-in obsolescence, without profitable waste and poor quality, and the subjection of
the environment to the vital aesthetic needs of the organism. To be sure, to translate
this possibility into reality would mean to eliminate the power of the dominant
interests which, by their very function in the society, are opposed to a development
that would reduce private enterprise to a minor role, that would do away with the
market economy, and with the policy of military preparedness, expansion, and
intervention – in other words: a development that would reverse the entire prevailing
trend. There is little evidence for such a development. In the meantime, and with the
new and terribly effective and total means provided by technical progress, the

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Frankfurt School: Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society. Herbert Marcuse. 1967

population is physically and mentally mobilized against this eventuality: they must
continue the struggle for existence in painful, costly and obsolete forms.

This is the real contradiction which translates itself from the social structure into the
mental structure of the individuals. There, it activates and aggravates destructive
tendencies which, in a hardly sublimated mode, are made socially useful in the
behavior of the individuals, on the private as well as political level – in the behavior
of the nation as a whole. Destructive energy becomes socially useful aggressive
energy, and the aggressive behavior impels growth – growth of economic, political,
and technical power. Just as in the contemporary scientific enterprise, so in the
economic enterprise and in that of the nation as a whole, constructive and destructive
achievements, work for life and work for death, procreating and killing are
inextricably united. To restrict the exploitation of nuclear energy would mean to
restrict its peaceful as well as military potential; the amelioration and protection of
life appear as by-products of the scientific work on the annihilation of life; to restrict
procreation would also mean to restrict potential manpower and the number of
potential customers and clients. Now the (more or less sublimated) transformation of
destructive into socially useful aggressive (and thereby constructive) energy is,
according to Freud (on whose instinct-theory I base my interpretation) a normal and
indispensable process. It is part of the same dynamic by which libido, erotic energy,
is sublimated and made socially useful; the two opposite impulses are forced together
and, united in this twofold transformation, they become the mental and organic
vehicles of civilization. But no matter how close and effective their union, their
respective quality remains unchanged and contrary: aggression activates destruction
which “aims” at death, while libido seeks the preservation, protection, and
amelioration of life. Therefore, it is only as long as destruction works in the service of
Eros that it serves civilization and the individual; if aggression becomes stronger than
its erotic counterpart, the trend is reversed. Moreover, in the Freudian conception,
destructive energy cannot become stronger without reducing erotic energy: the
balance between the two primary impulses is a quantitative one; the instinctual
dynamic is mechanistic, distributing an available quantum of energy between the two
antagonists.

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Frankfurt School: Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society. Herbert Marcuse. 1967

I have briefly restated Freud’s conception inasmuch as I shall use it to discuss the
depth and character of the strains prevalent in American society. I suggest that the
strains derive from the basic contradiction between the capabilities of this society,
which could produce essentially new forms of freedom amounting to a subversion of
the established institutions on the one hand, and the repressive use of these
capabilities on the other. The contradiction explodes – and is at the same time
“resolved,” “contained” – in the ubiquitous aggression prevalent in this society. Its
most conspicuous (but by no means isolated) manifestation is the military
mobilization and its effect on the mental behavior of the individuals, but within the
context of the basic contradiction, aggressiveness is fed by many sources. The
following seem to be foremost:

(1) The dehumanization of the process of production and consumption. Technical

progress is identical with the increasing elimination of personal initiative, inclination,
taste, and need from the provision of goods and services. This tendency is liberating
if the available resources and techniques are used for freeing the individual from
labor and recreation which are required for the reproduction of the established
institutions but are parasitic, wasteful, and dehumanizing in terms of the existing
technical and intellectual capabilities. The same tendency often gratifies hostility.

(2) The conditions of crowding, noise, and overtness characteristic of mass society.
As René Dubos has said, the need for “quiet, privacy, independence, initiative, and
some open space” are not “frills or luxuries but constitute real biological necessities.”
Their lack injures the instinctual structure itself. Freud has emphasized the “asocial”
character of Eros – the mass society achieves an “oversocialization” to which the
individual reacts “with all sorts of frustrations, repressions, aggressions, and fears
which soon develop into genuine neuroses.”

I mentioned, as the most conspicuous social mobilization of aggressiveness, the

militarization of the affluent society. This mobilization goes far beyond the actual
draft of man-power and the build-up of the armament industry: its truly totalitarian
aspects show forth in the daily mass media which feed “public opinion.” The

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brutalization of language and image, the presentation of killing, burning, and

poisoning and torture inflicted upon the victims of neocolonial slaughter is made in a
common-sensible, factual, sometimes humorous style which integrates these horrors
with the pranks of juvenile delinquents, football contests, accidents, stock market
reports, and the weatherman. This is no longer the “classical” heroizing of killing in
the national interest, but rather its reduction to the level of natural events and
contingencies of daily life.

The consequence is a “psychological habituation of war” which is administered to a

people protected from the actuality of war, a people who, by virtue of this
habituation, easily familiarizes itself with the “kill rate” as it is already familiar with
other “rates” (such as those of business or traffic or unemployment). The people are
conditioned to live “with the hazards, the brutalities, and the mounting casualties of
the war in Vietnam, just as one learns gradually to live with the everyday hazards and
casualties of smoking, of smog, or of traffic.”[1] The photos which appear in the daily
newspapers and in magazines with mass circulation, often in nice and glossy color,
show rows of prisoners laid out or stood up for “interrogation,” little children dragged
through the dust behind armored cars, mutilated women. They are nothing new
(“such things happen in a war”), but it is the setting that makes the difference: their
appearance in the regular program, in togetherness with the commercials, sports, local
politics, and reports on the social set. And the brutality of power is further normalized
by its extension to the beloved automobile: the manufacturers sell a Thunderbird,
Fury, Tempest, and the oil industry puts “a tiger in your tank.”

However, the administered language is rigidly discriminating: a specific vocabulary

of hate, resentment, and defamation is reserved for opposition to the aggressive
policies and for the enemy. The pattern constantly repeats itself. Thus, when students
demonstrate against the war, it is a “mob” swelled by “bearded advocates of sexual
freedom,” by unwashed juveniles, and by “hoodlums and street urchins” who & quot;
tramp” the streets, while the counterdemonstrations consist of citizens who gather. In
Vietnam, “typical criminal communist violence” is perpetrated against American
“strategic operations.” The Reds have the impertinence to launch “a sneak

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Frankfurt School: Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society. Herbert Marcuse. 1967
attack” (presumably they are supposed to announce it beforehand and to deploy in the
open); they are “evading a death trap” (presumably they should have stayed in). The
Vietcong attack American barracks “in the dead of night” and kill American boys
(presumably, Americans only attack in broad daylight, don’t disturb the sleep of the
enemy, and don’t kill Vietnamese boys). The massacre of hundred thousands of
communists (in Indonesia) is called “impressive” – a comparable “killing rate”
suffered by the other side would hardly have been honored with such an adjective. To
the Chinese, the presence of American troops in East Asia is a threat to their
“ideology,” while presumably the presence of Chinese troops in Central or South
America would be a real, and not only ideological, threat to the United States.

The loaded language proceeds according to the Orwellian recipe of the identity of
opposites: in the mouth of the enemy, peace means war, and defense is attack, while
on the righteous side, escalation is restraint, and saturation bombing prepares for
peace. Organized in this discriminatory fashion, language designates a priori the
enemy as evil in his entirety and in all his actions and intentions.

Such mobilization of aggressiveness cannot be explained by the magnitude of the

communist threat: the image of the ostensible enemy is inflated out of all proportion
to reality. What is at stake is rather the continued stability and growth of a system
which is threatened by its own irrationality – by the narrow base on which its
prosperity rests, by the dehumanization which its wasteful and parasitic affluence
demands. The senseless war is itself part of this irrationality and thus of the essence
of the system. What may have been a minor involvement at the beginning, almost an
accident, a contingency of foreign policy, has become a test case for the productivity,
competitiveness, and prestige of the whole. The billions of dollars spent for the war
effort are a political as well as economic stimulus (or cure): a big way of absorbing
part of the economic surplus, and of keeping the people in line. Defeat in Vietnam
may well be the signal for other wars of liberation closer to home – and perhaps even
for rebellion at home.

To be sure, the social utilization of aggressiveness belongs to the historical structure

of civilization and has been a powerful vehicle of progress. However, here too, there

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is a stage where quantity may turn into quality and subvert the normal balance
between the two primary instincts in favor of destruction. I mentioned the “bogey
man” of automation. In fact the real spectre for the affluent society is the possible
reduction of labor to a level where the human organism need no longer function as an
instrument of labor. The mere quantitative decline in needed human labor power
militates against the maintenance of the capitalist mode of production (as of all other
exploitative modes of production). The system reacts by stepping up the production
of goods and services which either do not enlarge individual consumption at all, or
enlarge it with luxuries – luxuries in the face of persistent poverty, but luxuries which
are necessities for occupying a labor force sufficient to reproduce the established
economic and political institutions. To the degree to which this sort of work appears
as superfluous, senseless, and unnecessary while necessary for earning a living,
frustration is built into the very productivity of this society, and aggressiveness is
activated. And to the degree to which the society in its very structure becomes
aggressive, the mental structure of its citizens adjusts itself: the individual becomes at
one and the same time more aggressive and more pliable and submissive, for he
submits by a society which, by virtue of its affluence and power, satisfies his deepest
(and otherwise greatly repressed) instinctual needs. And these instinctual needs
apparently find their libidinal reflection in the representatives of the people. the
chairman of the Armed Services Committee of the United States Senate, Senator
Russell of Georgia, was struck by this fact. He is quoted as saying:

There is something about preparing for destruction that causes men to be more careless
in spending money than they would be if they were building for constructive purposes.
Why that is, I do not know; but I have observed, over a period of almost thirty years in
the Senate, that there is something about buying arms with which to kill, to destroy, to
wipe out cities, and to obliterate great transportation systems which causes men not to
reckon the dollar cost as closely as they do when they think about proper housing and the
care of the health of human beings.[2]

I have argued elsewhere the question of how one can possibly gauge and historically
compare the aggression prevalent in a specific society; instead of restating the case, I
want now to focus on different aspects, on the specific forms in which aggression
today is released and satisfied.

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The most telling one, and the one which distinguishes the new from the traditional
forms, is what I call technological aggression and satisfaction. The phenomenon is
quickly described: the act of aggression is physically carried out by a mechanism with
a high degree of automatism, of far greater power than the individual human being
who sets it in motion, keeps it in motion, and determines its end or target. The most
extreme case is the rocket or missile; the most ordinary example the automobile. This
means that the energy, the power activated and consummated is the mechanical,
electrical, or nuclear energy of “things” rather than the instinctual energy of a human
being. Aggression is, as it were, transferred from a subject to an object, or is at least
“mediated” by an object, and the target is destroyed by a thing rather than by a
person. This change in the relation between human and material energy, and between
the physical and mental part of aggression (man becomes the subject and agent of
aggression by virtue of his mental rather than physical faculties) must also affect the
mental dynamic. I submit a hypothesis which is suggested by the inner logic of the
process: with the “delegation” of destruction to a more or less automated thing or
group and system of things, the instinctual satisfaction of the human person is
“interrupted,” reduced, frustrated, “super-sublimated.” And such frustration makes
for repetition and escalation: increasing violence, speed, enlarged scope. At the same
time, personal responsibility, conscience, and the sense of guilt is weakened, or rather
diffused, displaced from the actual context in which the aggression was committed (i.
e. bombing raids), and relocated in a more or less innocuous context (impoliteness,
sexual inadequacy, etc.). In this reaction too, the effect is a considerable weakening of
the sense of guilt, and the defense (hatred, resentment) is also redirected from the real
responsible subject (the commanding officer, the government) to a substitute person:
not I as a (morally and physically) acting person did it, but the thing, the machine.
The machine: the word suggests that an apparatus consisting of human beings may be
substituted for the mechanical apparatus: the bureaucracy, the administration, the
party, or organization is the responsible agent; I, the individual person, was only the
instrumentality. And an instrument cannot, in any moral sense, be responsible or be in
a state of guilt. In this way, another barrier against aggression, which civilization had
erected in a long and violent process of discipline is removed. And the expansion of

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advanced capitalism becomes involved in a fateful psychical dialectic which enters

into and propels its economic and political dynamic: the more powerful and
“technological” aggression becomes, the less is it apt to satisfy and pacify the primary
impulse, and the more it tends toward repetition and escalation.

To be sure, the use of instruments of aggression is as old as civilization itself, but

there is a decisive difference between technological aggression and the more
primitive forms. The latter were not only quantitatively different (weaker): they
required activation and engagement of the body to a much higher degree than the
automated or semi-automated instruments of aggression. The knife, the “blunt
instrument,” even the revolver are far more “part” of the individual who uses them
and they associate him more closely with his target. Moreover, and most important,
their use, unless effectively sublimated and in the service of the life instincts (as in
the case of the surgeon, household, etc.), is criminal – individual crime – and as such
subject to severe punishment. In contrast, technological aggression is not a crime. The
speeding driver of an automobile or motor boat is not called a murderer even if he is
one; and certainly the missile-firing engineers are not.

Technological aggression releases a mental dynamic which aggravates the

destructive, antierotic tendencies of the puritan complex. The new modes of
aggression destroy without getting one’s hands dirty, one’s body soiled, one’s mind
incriminated. The killer remains clean, physically as well as mentally. The purity of
his deadly work obtains added sanction if it is directed against the national enemy in
the national interest.

The (anonymous) lead article in Les Temps Modernes (January 1966) links the war in
Vietnam with the puritan tradition in the United States. The image of the enemy is
that of dirt in its most repulsive forms; the unclean jungle is his natural habitat,
disembowelment and beheading are his natural ways of action. Consequently, the
burning of his refuge, defoliation, and the poisoning of his foodstuff are not only
strategic but also moral operations: removing of contagious dirt, clearing the way for
the order of political hygiene and righteousness. And the mass purging of the good
conscience from all rational inhibitions leads to the atrophy of the last rebellion of

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sanity against the madhouse: no satire, no ridicule attends the moralists who organize
and defend the crime. Thus one of them can, without becoming a laughingstock,
publicly praise as the “greatest performance in our nation’s history,” the indeed
historical achievement of the richest, most powerful, and most advanced country of
the world unleashing the destructive force of its technical superiority on one of the
poorest, weakest, and most helpless countries of the world.

The decline of responsibility and guilt, their absorption by the omnipotent technical
and political apparatus also tends to invalidate other values which were to restrain and
sublimate aggression. While the militarization of society remains the most
conspicuous and destructive manifestation of this tendency, its less ostensible effects
in the cultural dimension should not be minimized. One of these effects is the
disintegration of the value of truth. The media enjoy a large dispensation from the
commitment to truth, and in a very special way. The point is not that the media lie
( “lie” presupposes commitment to truth), they rather mingle truth and half-truth with
omission, factual reporting with commentary and evaluation, information with
publicity and propaganda – all this made into an overwhelming whole through
editorializing. The editorially unpleasant truths (and how many of the most decisive
truths are not unpleasant?) retreat between the lines, or hide, or mingle harmoniously
with nonsense, fun, and so-called human interest stories. And the consumer is readily
inclined to take all this for granted – he buys it even if he knows better. Now the
commitment to the truth has always been precarious, hedged with strong
qualifications, suspended, or suppressed – it is only in the context of the general and
democratic activation of aggressiveness that the devaluation of truth assumes special
significance. For truth is a value in the strict sense inasmuch as it serves the
protection and amelioration of life, as a guide in man’s struggle with nature and with
himself, with his own weakness and his own destructiveness. In this function, truth is
indeed a matter of the sublimated life instincts, Eros, of intelligence becoming
responsible and autonomous, striving to liberate life from dependence on unmastered
and repressive forces. And with respect to this protective and liberating function of
truth, its devaluation removes another effective barrier against destruction.

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Frankfurt School: Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society. Herbert Marcuse. 1967

The encroachment of aggression on the domain of the life instincts also devalues the
aesthetic dimension. In Eros and Civilization I have tried to show the erotic
component in this dimension. Nonfunctional, that is to say, not committed to the
functioning of a repressive society, the aesthetic values have been strong protectors of
Eros in civilization. Nature is part of this dimension. Eros seeks, in polymorphous
forms, its own sensuous world of fulfillment, its own “natural” environment. But only
in a protected world – protected from daily business, from noise, crowds, waste, only
thus can it satisfy the biological need for happiness. The aggressive business practices
which turn ever more spaces of protective nature into a medium of commercial
fulfillment and fun thus do not merely offend beauty – they repress biological
necessities.

Once we agree to discuss the hypothesis that, in advanced industrial society surplus-
aggression is released in quite unsuspected and “normal” behavior, we may see it
even in areas which are far removed from the more familiar manifestations of
aggression, for instance the style of publicity and information practiced by the mass
media. Characteristic is the permanent repetition: the same commercial with the same
text or picture broadcast or televised again and again; the same phrases and clichés
poured out by the purveyors and makers of information again and again; the same
programs and platforms professed by the politicians again and again. Freud arrived at
his concept of the death instinct in the context of his analysis of the “repetition
compulsion”: he associated with it the striving for a state of complete inertia, absence
of tension, return to the womb, annihilation. Hitler knew well the extreme function of
repetition: the biggest lie, often enough repeated, will be acted upon and accepted as
truth. Even in its less extreme use, constant repetition, imposed upon more or less
captive audiences, may be destructive: destroying mental autonomy, freedom of
thought, responsibility and conducive to inertia, submission, rejection of change. The
established society, the master of repetition, becomes the great womb for its citizens.
To be sure, this road to inertia and this reduction of tension is one of high and not
very satisfactory sublimation: it does not lead to an instinctual nirvana of satisfaction.
However, it may well reduce the stress of intelligence, the pain and tension which
accompany autonomous mental activity – thus it may be an effective aggression

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Frankfurt School: Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society. Herbert Marcuse. 1967

against the mind in its socially disturbing, critical functions.

These are highly speculative hypotheses on the socially and mentally fateful character
of aggression in our society. Aggression is (in most cases) socially useful
destructiveness – and yet fateful because of its self-propelling character and scope. In
this respect too, it is badly sublimated and not very satisfying. If Freud’s theory is
correct, and the destructive impulse strives for the annihilation of the individual’s
own life no matter how long the “detour” via other lives and targets, then we may
indeed speak of a suicidal tendency on a truly social scale, and the national and
international play with total destruction may well have found a firm basis in the
instinctual structure of individuals.

Notes
1. I. Ziferstein, in the UCLA Daily Bruin, Los Angeles, May 24, 1966. See also:
M. Grotjahn, “Some Dynamics of Unconscious and Symbolic Communication in
Present-Day Television,” The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, III, pp. 356ff., and
Psychiatric Aspects of the Prevention of Nuclear War, Group for the
Advancement of Psychiatry (New York, 1964), passim.

2. Quoted in The Nation, August 25, 1962, pp. 65-66, in an article by Senator
William Proxmire.

Herbert Marcuse Archive

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